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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (120621)	9/9/2009 2:04:21 AM
From: wonk	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541933

As John said earlier, paraphrasing someone else, this issue has been framed WAY wrong. Of course, because the progressives haven’t learned what the gopers did long ago, how to demonize your opponent’s strengths, if you cannot co-opt or steal them. The proper framing would have started out with the preeminent theme of the Conservatives for the past 30 years and grafted onto it the old FDR theme, then flipping the govt bureaucrat image right back at them. This is all about Freedom, Freedom from fear. You pitch it right at the middle class who all fear that after a lifetime of hard work and responsible living, home, savings family and ultimately life itself would be extinguished because of the “timing” of an accident or illness and the decisions of a nameless faceless bureaucrat in an insurance company who chooses to deny the coverage you’ve long paid for.... Then you frame with the real world statistics: Total spending on health care, per person, 2007: United States: $7290 Switzerland: $4417 France: $3601 United Kingdom: $2992 Italy: $2686 Japan: $2581… Average of OECD developed nations: $2964 oecd.org So here in the US we pay twice as much as anyone in the developed world and we have no better outcomes. Then go on about statistics on life expectancy, infant mortality etc etc. and asking Where is all this extra money going and what are we getting for it and how can it be if we are the best in the world? The only tactic they’ve had since then age of Nixon and Reagan is misplaced anger and misdirection. Make the populace believe in the something for nothing, welfare queen myth, while the real bad guys are stealing their wallet. Some choice quotes from FDR’s speech In Madison Square Garden in October 1936 (not much has changed). … What was our hope in 1932? Above all other things the American people wanted peace. They wanted peace of mind instead of gnawing fear. First, they sought escape from the personal terror which had stalked them for three years. They wanted the peace that comes from security in their homes: safety for their savings, permanence in their jobs, a fair profit from their enterprise. Next, they wanted peace in the community, the peace that springs from the ability to meet the needs of community life: schools, playgrounds, parks, sanitation, highways: those things which are expected of solvent local government. They sought escape from disintegration and bankruptcy in local and state affairs…… For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent... We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering… Here is an amazing paradox! The very employers and politicians and publishers who talk most loudly of class antagonism and the destruction of the American system now undermine that system by this attempt to coerce the votes of the wage earners of this country. .... It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them.. history.sandiego.edu